Do Your Fears Hold You Back? | Blog Carnival 1

A man noticed that the elephants in the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus were kept in place by only a small rope tied to their front legs. They didn’t have chains, nor were they in cages. Although the big elephants could break away from these shackles, they did not.

The elephant trainer explained, “When the elephants are very young and much smaller, we use this same size rope to tie them. At that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They think the rope can still hold them, so they never even try to break free.”

It was their conditioning that kept them from realizing their own strengths. Aren’t we often like the elephants? We have some notions of ourselves, ideas about what we can and cannot do and these often hold us down.

Do your fears hold you back?

Often like the elephants we don’t realize how powerful we truly are. One of my favourite quotes is the one often wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela, but actually from Marianne Willaimson:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”